Rage

I have been in an anxiety attack since 6:28AM, it is now 2:06 PM…. Chest is tight… I can’t catch my breath… Every small thing is huge, and all I can do is breathe through it… White Knuckles…Deeply in. 1.2.3.4 Completely out. 1.2.3.4. Tears… Well not tears so much these days, what with the medication. But I can assure you I’ve lived this cycle enough to know tears would be next if they were capable of falling anymore. All this going on, a storm inside dark as night. 

How can this be, you must be thinking. The figure before you seems bright, cheery, listless. A lie. A perfect frame with the sole intention to fool you. So you only see what I want you to see. 

During the waking hours my caricature is happy and bubbly with endless grace and patience. To fill that roll today, the armor must be forced on. It’s not the organic breezy lighthearted care I feel when I’m embodied. It’s forced and the resistance of my anxiety grows beneath the armor. I’ve been dawning this armor for so long now that when I need to force it, I feel like a grouchy teenager on their way to family dinner. “No one understands me, and you’re forcing me to conform.” (Green Day had its indelible affect on me). 

All I feel coursing through my body is disdain. The way the world works seems to be about how people use other people to get what they want. And for me, I can no longer stomach it. 

I’ve been a person of the world for so long now. I know how to handle people. I know how to quickly figure out what motivates a person, how to read their mannerisms to find out if they are volatile. This reading has kept me safe, helps me to understand what my next move should be. 

But this super power no longer serves me. I can’t allow myself to constantly be subjected to a world that is eager to see a person fail, that makes me feel on edge. Something that was recently said to me after winning an award of recognition of a job well done. “Now you have a target on your back.” this was from a mid level executive in hopes it would control me to do as he said as a way to keep myself in the “club”. 

I’ve been putting on a smile and getting throug the days, because I’m afraid of what? Failure? Success? Something more true would be, The unknown. Shaky ground, instability. Because a pattern I know of instability is it leads to falls. 

 I understand that the world is not always a place filled with happiness, and there’s so much more struggle in the surrounding area of me that if you dropped a pin to my location and drew a circle as dark and unyielding. There are times when I can feel the sorrow of the world heavy on my chest and the weight of the responsibility is crushing. I feel the guilt of my many capabilities provided to me from my ability to chameleon into the “right” situations and act as polite society regulates us to be. 

There is also this anxious and deeply sensitive self who also deserves to be heard and seen. I have been shielding her from the pain of the realities of the day in, day out mediocrity I’ve settled. A pattern of sameness, of safe consistency, of conformity to the expectations and the comfort that comes from all that unending privilege.

My anger is a mask of my knowing. A distraction from the truth of the now, a dark wood of err. I do know what makes me deeply unhappy. And I owe it to myself to run from those things no matter what they are. It takes a great deal of privilege.